The Recipes that Lived to See Another Year for the Holidays

Last year I hosted my first Thanksgiving. It was a lot of work, but a lot of fun, too. I may have gone a little overboard creating a menu, but everything turned out great thanks to my husband's contribution of a detailed calendar of when to put what in the oven, etc.

My parents hosted Thanksgiving this year, and my husband requested I bring two dishes from last year: maple-mashed sweet potatoes and chorizo cornbread stuffing.

Most of my Thanksgiving menu last year was courtesy Rachael Ray, whose recipes I have surprisingly come to love. I'm not much of a daytime talk show viewer, given that I work full-time away from the home, and I really don't spend a lot of time on the Food Network. Though that is slowly changing! Sunday mornings are my favorite time to turn the Food Network on and just let it run while I'm making pancakes and eggs. Anyway, long story short, after a successful Thanksgiving with her recipes, I've tried others and they've also been great.

I highly recommend the maple-mashed sweet potatoes. They are mashed with, you guessed it, real maple syrup - and butter. How can you go wrong? 

You can find the recipe I used here:

• Maple-Mashed Sweet Potatoes

And the chorizo cornbread stuffing ... yum ... it's perfect for me because I LOVE stuffing, but I avoid gluten. That's a tough one. If you make this recipe, use Pamela's Cornbread and Muffin Mix. It's the perfect amount of sweetness, and beats out any other cornbread ready-made mix that I've tried. And no I'm not being paid to say that. I honestly think that that mix helps make this stuffing work.

You can find the recipe I used for this stuffing here:

• Chorizo Cornbread Stuffing

Enjoy!

How to Plant Garlic in the Winter for Early Summer Harvest

I'm a newbie to the gardening game, so imagine my excitement when I found out that I could plant some veggies in the fall to have them appear in spring or early summer.

Love it.

And with all the cooking I've been doing lately, I have discovered I use a lot of garlic. So why not start my fall planting experiment with garlic.

I started by breaking apart the garlic into individual cloves, keeping the thin shells on each.

Ripening Tomatoes Indoors: It's Easy

My garden was a little delayed in harvesting thanks to a little thing called flooding in Colorado this year. It water-logged most of my plants right at prime harvest time.

So after things dried up, I cleaned up the fruits that were no good, and decided to let the remaining tomatoes in particular hang out for a bit in the garden.

When I could finally hold out no longer, I took the tomatoes - mostly my San Marzanos - off the plant, placed them in a box in the hopes that they would ripen in my kitchen. I had nothing to lose really.

Chipotle Shrimp Tacos with Avocado Crema

I discovered Foodie Crush the other day; in particular this recipe on the blog – Chipotle Shrimp Burritos with Simple Avocado Crema.

One word: Awesome.

How did I come upon this recipe? I bought chipotle in adobo sauce to make tacos out of the cookbook, Salsas and Tacos, I got for my birthday in September. If you’re interested in checking that out, visit the Santa Fe Cooking School’s online store here.

I wasn’t really sure how the tacos, which involved shredded chicken with chipotle seasoning as well as a sour cream (crème fraiche is what it actually calls for) sauce blended with the abovementioned chipotles in adobo sauce. Turns out, I really liked it.

Red Posole: Using Ancho Chiles, Hominy & Queso Fresco for the First Time

I made this recipe the other day - Rachael Ray's Red Pork Posole - sans the pickled onions. It was delicious!

It took me three to four hours and was an education in using a couple of new ingredients (to me).

Ancho chiles: 

The Great Potato Harvest of 2013 (Kind Of)

I planted clearance potatoes halfway through the summer. Some say that planting potatoes later in the summer can fool the bugs, and may prevent some pest problems.

I'm not sure. But they were cheap, I hadn't ever tried potatoes, and I had space. So I bought some that I normally wouldn't, and tested them out. Why not?

Here was my grand harvest, all 11 of them:

Potatoes, fresh from the garden

Now granted, I have never grown potatoes before, and wasn't sure what the best practices were. I didn't realize that once the plants reach 6-8 inches tall, you mound the soil around it so that just 4 inches or so are showing. That will increase your yield if you continue to do that over the summer.

The beauty of being a beginning gardener is that you learn more every year. Next year, I'm going to try out grow bags from Gardener's Supply.

I'd like to use them for both potatoes and for sweet potatoes, which we eat quite a lot of and are supposed to store well. Seems like an easy way to keep them away from the weeds in my garden ... which I'm still fighting post-flood ... and keep them away from pests.

I ate my entire potato harvest tonight with the assistance of my man; I have to say, breakfast for dinner is the best! And the potatoes, like all food fresh from a garden, tasted so good!

Grasshoppers in My Garden

So the one good thing that may have occurred due to the crazy rain we had the last couple of weeks is that the grasshoppers I discovered a couple days before it started seem to have disappeared. Will they come back? I don't know. I hope not.

Here's a little guy I found on my pepper plant that has produced a total of, yes, one pepper all summer. Miraculously, it started flowering again a few days after the rain stopped. I don't know if it's coincidental that I also haven't seen a grasshopper lately ... I have seen them in other parts of my yard.

A grasshopper on my bell pepper plant ... look in the middle.

Grasshoppers may be the reason my fall lettuce seedlings keep getting eaten (they like their lettuce).

So what to do?

Weeds After the Flooding

As damage goes, I didn't get much from the recent Colorado floods. I have very little to complain about - my home is on one of the highest points in Longmont and I don't live near the river that splits the town in half.

The storm came, hung out over Colorado and would not go away. The results for the state were tragic - hundreds of millions of dollars in damage.

As a result of the week's worth of rain, that just wouldn't stop, my garden had far more weeds than actual edibles. A literal blanket of baby weeds, just starting to peek their heads out. It gave me a peek into what happens if you over-water (to an extreme) your garden.

And also because of the record rain, I could not get out there in the garden to fight them effectively.

I finally got the chance to do some weed mitigation right before I left for California. I didn't do a stellar job. They were all little weeds, so I just took the hoe and scraped them up. It's to be seen how effective that was, but at least for a little while they'll stop hogging water and nutrition from the plants I'm trying to squeeze a decent harvest out of!

It's yet to be seen if the excess water rotted roots or even some of the root veggies I'm growing. It did cause some tomatoes to tear for too much water (apparently tomatoes don't know when to stop drinking ...) and I have a feeling the nutrition that was in the soil has probably seeped away. I will need to do a final fertilizing when I get home from California.

Here's one blog I found looking at what you should do after a heavy rain: 9 Gardening Tips to Do After a Heavy Rain

Roasting Hot Peppers

One of the things going well for me this year in my garden are my mucho nacho peppers. There are plenty coming off the one plant I have. I harvested a handful a week or two ago and roasted them in the broiler.

Here are some directions on allrecipes to roast peppers in your broiler.

I took the five peppers, laid them out on the pan, brushed them with oil and popped them in the broiler. When one side started turning black, I flipped them. Then I let them cool completely and threw them in the freezer, with plans to use them down the road in the same recipes I have previously used canned chiles for!

Plenty of Zucchini for Zucchini Crisps and Even More Zucchini Muffins!

What to do with all my zucchini?
Bake, of course!

It's been awhile since I have posted to this blog. Have no fear: I've been keeping busy with the garden - some good, some bad things.

But through it all,zucchini has been there.

Of course, not as much zucchini as last year. My one zucchini plant has consistently produced enough of the veggie to harvest one to two a week. Sometimes more.

I've made A LOT of zucchini muffins this year. And my husband and his sister, who stayed with us for a bit this summer, ate them all up. As I've shared on this blog before, this recipe is my favorite for zucchini muffins. But I've made a few adjustments:

Oh Butternut Squash, Why Do You Treat Me So???

When I introduced butternut squash to my garden midsummer, I was optimistic I'd have absolutely no issues growing it in the space. And yet, this is what it currently looks like ...

Butternut squash, my problem child ...

Grrrr ...

Black-Eyed Susans Make a Grand Entrance!

I am a little bummed it's already August, but my flowers continue to bloom and will through probably the end of September! Lots of time yet! This weekend, my black-eyed susans bloomed! Love it!

Black-eyed susans make their entrance! (gnomeknowsbest.blogspot.com)

Organic Solutions for Powdery Mildew

Lately I've been trying out the
ready-to-apply Natria neem oil
solution. Not as cost-effective as
buying concentrate, but easy!

I've relied on neem oil nearly exclusively to treat garden problems over the past two years after hearing of it from a friend on, where else, Facebook.

It's an insecticide and a fungicide, and pretty darn effective when applied early on in a problem in the garden.

I went out to my garden the other day after not visiting for a day, and discovered the rain and cooler weather we've been having had contributed to a breakout of powdery mildew.

Not the best picture of powdery mildew, but here's one of my cucumber leaves. You'll see it looks like a bunch of powdery spots. When it spreads, it eventually looks like someone put powdered sugar on your plants:

The start of powdery mildew on my cucumber leaves.
Left untreated, it will spread. I'm trying to prevent that.

I trimmed as many of the leaves affected off the plant as possible, and then threw them out and washed my hands. I probably should have been more careful about where the pruned leaves fell, as I'm afraid I may have helped the airborne spores spread. Anyway, I then sprayed with neem oil the affected plans and nearby plants. But after doing some research, I've decided that while neem oil is effective against powdery mildew, it may not be the most effective treatment.

Birds Eating My Seedlings ... Drunken Dragonfly to the Rescue!

Or at least that's the hope! My man and I went to the Flower Bin here in Longmont a couple weeks ago in search of both veggies to harvest in the fall and for something that would hopefully deter birds from my garden.

As I've written before, birds were eating my lettuce seedlings, making me think I needed to grow them a little larger and transplant them into the garden. But first I wanted to see if I could find something to deter them from eating them in the first place.

We found just one thing that was shiny (I have read in many places online that hanging CDs from a tree nearby, etc helps) and that I actually wanted in my garden: a Drunken Dragonfly made by Paul's Metal Petals.

It's made of silverware (cool, right?) and seems to be reflective enough to keep birds away. I only have anecdotal evidence, but the seeds I planted the same day that I put the garden ornament in the ground have turned into seedlings and have not yet been eaten by birds.

Check it out:

What Can I Do with All These Cucumbers?!?

My cucumbers are thriving in my garden this year! I think I've said this before, but I attribute that to giving them plenty of space and having a nice trellis for them to climb (and already overtake!).

Exhibit 1: Discovered this cucumber, hidden and overgrown,
the other day. Here it is next to a couple of perfectly sized zucchinis!

But I'm harvesting a couple cucumbers a day, and I'm not seeing an end to that. So what in the world will I do with them, aside from sharing with my co-workers? Zucchini is easier - lots of options to mix zucchini in with any number of dishes. (Here are a few of my favorite zucchini recipes ...)

One of the great benefits of gardening is that you suddenly have a bunch of produce, and you have to come up with creative ways to use it! It's great motivation because you certainly don't want to throw it out and while I don't mind sharing produce, I would like to use as much of it as possible at my own house (until we get sick of it!).

So I'm on a mission to find some new cucumber recipes to try. I'm going to link to them here, and then try them out over the next week or two. Then I'll let you know how they went!

Here are three cucumber recipes that go beyond just throwing them in a salad (which I will also do). These are all from allrecipes.com, one of my favorite places to find good recipes, mostly because the review system is excellent! I often learn more from the reviewers than from the people submitting the recipes.

Rediscovering Beauty in the Front Yard

One of the fringe benefits of cleaning up a flower garden is rediscovering the beautiful flowers you actually have. We inherited the landscaping in the front of our home last year when we moved in, and the flowers are set such that something is always blooming! It's the best way to do it. Different flowers bloom at different times of year, no matter where you're at, and I've really enjoyed learning about the ways of the non-edible gardening world.

Yesterday I did a long overdue cleanup, trimming bushes and getting rid of flowers that bloomed weeks ago that have since dried up.

I don't pay that area of my front yard a lot of attention during the week, so I was pleased to see some beautiful flowers currently blooming! Here's a taste.

Inspired By ... Midsummer Planting

I have a gap in my garden right now, and I really want to fill it. Being relatively new to gardening, I wasn't sure what veggies I could plant midsummer for harvest in the fall.

I found this handy chart from the University of Minnesota Extension. The bottom line: I already knew I could do lettuce and kale and cabbage.

I don't have a ton of space, but enough that I can try a few new veggies out for some fresh fall treats, and add to my garlic patch (a small area of my garden) for garlic harvest next year.

I'm thinking I'll try out cauliflower and beets, both of which can handle a little frost in addition to planting more kale and lettuce under my cucumber trellis. (Only a few of my previous lettuce seeds actually are resulting in actual seedlings.)

Why Tomatoes May Flower ... But Not Set Fruit

My co-worker asked me today if I had any idea why her heirloom tomato plant was flowering and had been for a few weeks, but she had not yet seen fruit start to form.

I wasn't sure, but encouraged her to feed the plant if she hadn't (it's growing in a container, which makes it even more important to fertilize) as a starting point.

I did some research tonight on tomatoes and their fruit-setting ways and found two things, both highlighted in this article from Bonnie Plants, but also noted by other authors:

3 Lessons on Lettuce

I harvested a lot of lettuce this year for our daily lunch salads. But I had much higher hopes for my lettuce harvest.

Recently, I discovered that birds had been eating the lettuce seedlings that were coming up. I caught the problem too late though (thinking the seedlings were just taking their time growing) and while I covered up some of the remaining lettuce with row covers, I think it was too little too late. (You can also put something shiny/reflective near where birds are eating your veggies; some people suggest CDs hanging nearby, but I'm sure there is some garden art somewhere that would serve the same purpose.)

Bird netting would work, as well.

Anyway, I do have some seedlings that are doing OK that I planted later on, but because of a few mistakes I made this year so far, I have learned a couple lessons about growing lettuce:

1. Don't plant too many seedlings too early. Actually, early is fine. But I could have - and should have - staggered my transplants in the garden. This fall, when I plant again, I will stagger the plantings, so that all the lettuce I have doesn't get ripe (and later bolt) at the same time. Now I know how few lettuce plants I actually need to make a salad, since they will keep growing if you just harvest their outside leaves.

Why Is My Mint Turning Black?

I checked on my garden the other day and to my surprise, some of my mint leaves were black. Like this:

Black mint

My first thought: It has some plant disease I've not heard of. But then I did as I always do in these situations, and I Googled it. I often feel like I garden by Google these days. I mean, how did gardeners get by without Google? I'm only partly kidding ...

At any rate, it appears that mint sometimes turns black when it has had too much water. It's been very hot, so I've been watering every day, when the soil looked dry. But I'm going to switch to the strategy of waiting until the mint looks like it needs water, and then water it, and see whether that takes care of this little problem.

Weed Cleanup, Post-Vacation

I came home from more than a week on vacation, and the weeds around my garden (and a few in the garden) were going a little crazy. I may rethink my garden layout next year - maybe taking a few tips from the Square Foot Gardening method (whose book I just purchased) - and hopefully minimize weeds.

Most of the weeds and cleanup in the picture below are NOT from the garden itself, but from around the garden. My garden is in the back of my yard (I inherited it that way when we bought this house) and there is probably a foot of space between it and the fence behind it. There's also space between it on the fence between our yard and the neighbor's. As a result, weeds sprout up in the cracks, and climb the fence.

I have a theory that the vast amount of foliage is attracting pests that I don't want around. So I did a major cleanup, and plan to think about how I can better manage the out-of-control weeds that are hanging out around my garden. My veggies need their space!

Welcome, Butternut Squash!

Butternut squash, welcome to the garden!

I tore out my kale, and I replaced it with a butternut squash transplant, which needs about three months of no frost to grow - to be harvested right before the first frost of the year.

So now was a good time to plant it. I'm very excited about growing butternut squash, but I am nervous about it taking over the garden. From all I read and hear, it would spread out over the entire garden if I let it. My plan is to wait a little, and then try to coax it upward, a la vertical gardening.

This is obviously a first for me to grow butternut squash, but if all works out, it won't be the last!

Zucchini Problems? Maybe Not: Small Soft Yellow Fruits and Not So Powdery Mildew

I had no problems at all last year with zucchini, until the end of the summer that is. But even then, I was harvesting large zucchinis.

This year, it appears I will have some good zucchinis with my one plant (vs. my 3 last year), but I'm also seeing some soft, yellow fruits that aren't quite developing. See below:

Small soft yellow fruits on zucchini plants.

This might only indicate that pollination isn't happening on these particular fruits. I've taken to just cutting those fruits off, and monitoring the rest of the plant, which is actually producing some healthy looking zucchini plants.

And what I thought was powdery mildew has made an early appearance this year. Or is that what it really was?

The Fruits of My Labor: Tomatoes, Cucumbers and Strawberries

All is not lost in my garden. I tend to focus on a lot of problems in my journey toward being a gardener, including the persistent flea beetles and my struggling bell peppers, but I am having some wins.

For example, my Christmas Grape tomatoes are doing as well already as they did last year, in the same location in the garden. Here's the first ripening tomato! I plan to eat it soon!

And my beefsteak tomato is doing better than last year's attempt.

The Flea Beetles Have Moved to My Kale

I think I should have just left the arugula in the ground to attract the flea beetles that subsequently moved to my kale. I came home from vacation to this:

Flea beetle damage on my kale

Flea beetle damage on my kale

Now, the little buggers were already taking a few bites here and there before I left, but they seem to have multiplied.

On the Bright Side ... My Cucumbers Are Looking Great!

So while I'm struggling a little with two of my pepper plants (well, just one now that I know what that black stem was), my cucumbers are doing great!

And they are starting to climb my new trellis that I love, so far, from Gardener's Supply.

Cucumbers on my trellis from Gardeners Supply.

When I return from vacation, I anticipate I'll see more than what appear to be very small pickles hanging off that vine. The two cucumber plants already look better than the two I had last year.

2 Pepper Problems: Black Stems and Brown Patches on the Leaves

Why are my mucho nacho pepper plants turning black? I noticed a week or so ago that the stems were turning black, and I was worried. But other than the black stem, the plant was actually flowering and growing, which it wasn't.

My black-stemmed beauty ... Mucho Nacho Pepper

A quick Google search, and I find (correct me if it’s wrong) that it’s perfectly normal for some pepper plants to have black on their stems.

One of my bell pepper plants is also looking a little funky lately. The leaves look drier than they should, the plant appears to have stopped growing, and there’s a little bit of brown patch on the pepper leaves. The leaves are also curling. This problem I do not believe is “normal.” My golden bell pepper plant seems more than healthy, so the problem – whatever it is – appears to be isolated to this guy.

Bell pepper plant - not looking so healthy ...

I am on vacation right now, but I did find this helpful guide I plan to use when I get back. If my plant is still looking sickly, I'll take some action.

Here Come the Tomatoes

My tomatoes are growing! My Christmas Grape is producing ...

And my beefsteak tomato plant is certainly looking promising.

I've been torn on how much I should prune the tomato plants, however. My research is mixed. Some say that you should just leave it as nature intended. My plants definitely got large and sprawled last year. one produced well (the Christmas Grape) and the other not so well. Well, it grew, but it did not produce a lot of fruit. I decided to pinch off suckers and a few of the stems at the lower end of the plant.

I fertilized my tomatoes and peppers a week or two ago. The peppers are still struggling to grow, however. The bell pepper is doing much better than my Macho Nacho pepper. I pinched off a flower off my Macho Nacho hot pepper plant - the first one there - as I read that it can divert the energy away from the flower into the rest of the plant. Not sure I'm seeing the results yet!

I'm getting eager for my tomatoes and peppers to produce some fruit!

Strawberry Plant in Bloom

My strawberry plant is flowering. That's about it, but I love blooms because they signal the flower is growing and liking something about what I've done!

Kale Superfood Salad, Modified

I didn't have all the ingredients I needed to make the kale superfood salad I've seen at grocery stores the other day, so I modified it slightly. Really I just used whatever ingredients I had in the house, so it was simplified quite a bit.

I used the kale from my garden, chopped up (sans stem).

Half a container of blueberries. Yum!

Chopped red pepper.

And golden raisins.

The dressing I had was Caesar, so I tossed the salad lightly in that, and it turned out deliciously. Even my husband liked it. We served it alongside half a sweet potato and grilled tenderloin pork.

Inspired by … 3 New Ways to Eat Kale

I have a lot of kale in my garden.

As I’ve written before, I am growing eight kale plants right now. And they’re all doing well. Which means I need to find ways to eat them. And just for the record, I’m not crazy about kale chips. Doing a little research, and I found a few ways to prepare and eat kale, all of which look like more fun than a simple salad (which I love too!):

1. Kale Pesto. My co-worker mentioned this use to me, and I wasn’t sure, but I looked it up and found this recipe from Love and Lemons. The recipe calls for blanched kale, olive oil, walnuts, a garlic clove and lemon juice and zest, and parmesan cheese. I’m excited to try it!

2. Braised Chicken with Kale. This is from Cooking Light magazine.  I get bored with chicken, so trying something new would be good – and with kale – bonus!

3. Eggs with Kale. Who knew? I hadn’t thought of mixing in kale, sautéed in butter, with scrambled eggs. But I love adding veggies like broccoli to my eggs. So why not kale?

This is one of the benefits of a garden. You are forced to find new ways to try the veggies, lest they go to waste!

Planting Red Potatoes, a Little Late in the Season

My other project this weekend was figuring out what to plant in a side planter I have next to my garden. My original plan was flowers - nasturtiums or some other flower that also acts as natural pest control.

But I've been wanting to try out potatoes this year, and I was considering a grow bag, like these from Gardeners' Supply.  But then it occurred to me while wandering at the nursery this weekend that I could plant potatoes in the side planter. It's plenty deep and separate from the rest of the garden.

Planting Strawberries in a Hanging Planter

We finally planted strawberries. I know it's a little late to do so, but we really wanted to use strawberries in a hanging planter this year, knowing that we (read: I) are not good at keeping flowers in hanging planters alive. Somehow edibles are more my forte.

My original plan was to get alpine strawberries, which are a small and tasty variety that is good for container plants. They didn't have those, so we went for a bushy variety of strawberry, the Tristan, which should suit the hanging planter well. It will also provide some pretty flowers.

First I put rocks in the bottom of the planter I bought the other day at Lowe's. I do this with all my containers to allow for better drainage.

What Are Those Tiny Red Mites Hanging Out with My Coleus?

I've got fading coleus leaves and red spider mites. These tiny, tiny red bugs are hanging out on my raised flower bed where my two coleus plants are not exactly thriving. (They are growing, just much more slowly than I had anticipated.)

So what do I do about those spider mites? According to this website, the poppy-seed sized red mites thrive when humidity is low and can be controlled by cleaning the leaves, increasing humidity near the plants (not sure how that is accomplished outside!) or spraying the leaves with a soap spray. I think I'll start with the latter.

As for the fading color of my red coleus leaves, I may have over-fertilized. Or the sun exposure is affecting it. The jury's still out, but because it is still growing, I'm not going to worry yet!

Fading red coleus leaves ...

Oh, the Joy of Pulling Weeds ...

Weeds, weeds and more weeds!

We bought our house a little over a year ago. It has a modestly sized yard on about a quarter-acre lot.

A relatively large portion of our yard however is bordered by river rock. An absurd amount, really. It's like the landscapers got lazy, and had space to fill, so they just threw down rock. I would much prefer a balance between that and mulch. And one day we'll have that. But not this year.

So as a result of the rock and the fact the landscape fabric probably hasn't been replaced since the house was built over a decade ago (hard to say, but I'm guessing it's true), we get a lot of weeds popping up in between all that rock. Managing our weeds has got to be one of my least favorite parts of owning a house.

Yesterday I caught my dog, who has not been feeling well, chomping down on a set of said weeds in the corner of our yard. So my husband and I spent about an hour pulling all the weeds that appeared during the week that we were out of town. They seem to come from nowhere!

Since we caught my dog eating the weeds, we are reluctant to spray in these areas particularly in the backyard, even though the spray says it is pet-friendly. Instead, we're just going to stay on top of the weeds.

On the bright side, I pull weeds no matter how small in my vegetable garden every day when I check on it, and our mulch project in the front yard areas has helped minimize the weeds that pop up there. I guess we've made some progress!

The one challenge we have, not being familiar with every plant, is knowing what's a weed and what to leave.

2 More in the Garden: San Marzano Heirloom Tomato and a Golden Bell Pepper

I planted two more veggies in my garden today in space left blank by failed garlic and onion. These will be my final additions until maybe August when I plant some fall crops, including some winter squash and some more lettuce.

I decided I loved tomatoes too much not to add a third to my garden this year. I chose an heirloom variety, San Marzano, a thinner, pointier early version of a Roma tomato. I plan to use it to make tomato sauce for chili, which is a favorite of mine in the winter!

I also added a pepper plant, this one a golden bell pepper, which joins a macho nacho hot pepper (like a jalapeno) and a simple green bell in the garden.

Eggs with Fresh Parsley, Monterey Jack & Ham = Delicious

Fresh Italian Parsley, ready to chop and add
to my eggs.

One of my new favorite ways to cook eggs on the weekends is with fresh parsley.

Yesterday I snipped a couple sprigs of parsley from my deck, chopped it up and threw it in with scrambled eggs. I also added cubed monterey jack cheese and chopped deli ham. I seasoned the eggs with Lawry's Seasoned Salt.

Delicious!

I love fresh herbs. In fact, I'm planning to go out today and purchase a few more to fill in the empty slots on my deck.

As a related tip, I saw an episode of America's Test Kitchen where they made the "perfect" scrambled eggs. I have not followed their recipe perfectly, but their approach - cooked on lower temps, slowly, constantly moving the eggs around the pan - results in a delicious, fluffy and moist breakfast!

Inspired by ... Camping Gourmet

A shot of a campfire from when we camped at Buffalo Creek
recreation area near Evergreen, CO, a couple of years ago.

I am planning a camping trip for my fourth wedding anniversary to the Grand Tetons. The plan is to stay there for five days or so, camping for most of the time.

The plan is also to save money by not eating out; in other words, we plan to eat primarily at the campsite. Which I love. And I think will be fun if I can plan the menu out ahead of time.
I love all parts of camping but the actual sleeping part. I don't remember the sleeping part bothering me when I was younger, when my parents would take us to Yankton, SD, or to the Black Hills on the other side of South Dakota during the summer. I have very fond memories of camping.

So I think it's the result of getting older. The air mattress and the larger tent do help.

I also prefer to car camp. Which means that we can really bring whatever we want to cook with when we go at the end of June.

To that end, I found this article with 16 Delicious Camping Meals from Sunset Magazine very inspiring!

I'll probably skip the steak recipes, but I did like the idea of bringing chili with us and making camp pizza in our new cast iron skillet. I'll have to test out some gluten-free crust recipes before that though.

The chicken enchilada nacho bowls also looked like a nice change from our regular diet of bratwurst and hamburgers.

What do you like to eat when camping?

Purplish Spots Mean My Basil Has Burned ... I Think

I was thinking that the purplish spots on my sweet basil were actually just how my basil was supposed to look. I planted the basil in my garden, between my two types of tomatoes. If what I'm finding on the Internet is true, I may have planted the seedling too quickly before hardening it off.

I harvested a pile of leaves today from the plant, so I'm hoping that the two tomato plants it's near will grow and shade it sufficiently to protect the basil going forward.

Other than what appears to be burned leaves, the plant is growing well, much better and faster than the basil growing in a container on my deck. It gets full sun for much of the day, which basil is supposed to love, and sufficient water. I'll be watching it to see how it does!

Basil!

I mentioned yesterday how I love to add basil to my salads now. It's a simple way to add a little surprise to your salad.

I'm growing three types of basil, and I may plant more yet so that I can stock up on pesto, which I'll freeze in cubes and brush on chicken or fish.

I'm eager for my basil to grow faster and for my recently planted tomatoes to catch up. One of my favorite treats from the garden last year was layering basil and slices of tomato as an easy appetizer or happy hour treat.

I'm sure I'll dig up more ways to eat basil this year!

The purple of the red rubin basil is beautiful in my deck rail planter.

Our Daily Salad Routine, Now Straight from the Garden

How wonderful is it that I can just walk out to my garden in the morning and harvest some lettuce for my salad for lunch? Pretty darn wonderful.

I was almost tempted yesterday to skip my daily salad. For over a year now, my husband and I have been taking salads nearly daily to work for lunch. I think it's made a huge difference in our health, and on our wallet.

How to Store Freshly Harvested Lettuce

I found a nifty little tutorial on how to store the lettuce I harvest from my garden. You can read it here from Pinch My Salt. It definitely works. 

First I put the fresh lettuce in a big bowl of cold water, and then rinse each leaf individually after taking it out of the bowl.

Beautiful! I love all the colors that come out of my garden.

I spin it in my handy salad spinner, which I use every day now. Ours is from Oxo, and it works great.

And then as the blog recommended, I wrap the lettuce in a paper towel and put it in a Zip-loc bag.

So far, this has resulted in crisp lettuce that lasts several days, which is nice, because I can make a big harvest of lettuce and prep it for several days worth of lunches.

Spring Has Sprung!

One of the best things about buying a house that had landscaping already finished, at least in part of the yard, is that every couple of weeks in the summer, new flowers pop up. I love it! Here's a glimpse of the colors gracing my yard.

Spots on My Chard: Not Sure I Like the Answer Why

Yesterday my chard looked like this, beautiful:

And now my chard looks like this, covered in brown spots, seemingly overnight ...

A quick search has uncovered the reason may be due to leaf miners. Which are disgusting. They are small grey flies, and they are "truly one of the grossest" garden pests, according to one writer. They literally lay eggs, which hatch, and the maggots burrow between the leaves of the plant.

Yes. Gross.

Keeping the Dog Out of the Garden

My dog Reese loves our new yard. We moved into our home about a year ago, and he just loves being outside while I garden.

We had to come up with a way that he would not actually try to garden with me though, so we bought decorative wooden garden fencing from Lowe's, I believe, and spray painted them white.

Now, my chihuahua can easily jump over them, but for some reason, most of the time, he doesn't.

Here's Reese saying hi from the right side of the fence!